The Gadgets Page

If you have a need to figure out what a person is doing with their computer, for example to monitor what your teenagers do online, there is a class of devices called Keystroke loggers that security and HR professionals often employ to capture everything that is typed on a computer. This includes passwords, websites, outgoing email, and instant messages.

If you need a keystroke logger, you can’t do better than the Keelogger Flash USB, from www.keelog.com. This clever device records all the keystrokes that go through it to a text file stored in flash memory on the device. At any time, you can press a set of keys simultaneously (by default, “kbs”) to connect the device as flash memory. When you do this, another drive will show up in “my computer” automatically (or on your desktop in Mac OS X) and it will contain a simple text file of all keystrokes logged since the file was created. You can copy that file to your computer, and then simply eject the flash drive to re-enable the keyboard functionality. There is no software or drivers to install to read the data from the device.

It’s a huge boon to my security practice because we can read data directly on the computers we need to monitor without giving away the presence of the device to the people being monitored and without removing it.

There are caveats to the use of any keystroke logger however: It is physically obvious that something is connected between the keyboard and the computer. Should someone notice it, they could move the keyboard to a different USB port and them move it back when they’re finished—giving you the impression that you’ve captured all keystrokes when you haven’t. The only solution to this is to disassemble the keyboard and install a keystroke logger inside it, which is technically somewhat difficult. You also can’t use a keystroke logger to capture data from a laptop keyboard or from fingerprint sensors, so monitoring laptop users requires a software solution. Finally, keystroke loggers can’t pickup data from remote control software such as VNC, Macintosh Screen Sharing, or Microsoft Remote Desktop.

The Keelogger is considerably simpler to use than the keystroke loggers I’ve used in my IT security practice in the past. Without getting into the morality of spying or admonishing you to trust people before spying on them, the keeLogger is a simple, effective device that requires no software to perform it’s job.